ABSTRACT
This chapter examines intellectual perspectives and debates both in the past and in the present about rural cooperative development in China. In the face of the rapid agrarian change in China, the 1930s debate may still shed some light on today's conundrum. Rural cooperatives first blossomed in the 1930s in the context of the Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) that enjoyed much official promotion and intellectual participation. In the context of the widespread agrarian crisis in China in 1932 and the imminent national crisis brought on by the Japanese occupation of China's northeast, some non-partisan intellectuals dedicated themselves to the RRM and promoted cooperatives as the RRM's key component. The post-Mao rural reform disbanded the rural communes and instituted two-tiered land rights: landownership rights belong to the village collective while land use rights were equally divided and leased to families for family contract farming.
